


good as new

by caynaise



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir Needs a Hug, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Identity Reveal, Ladrien June, Ladrien | Adrien Agreste/Marinette Dupain-Cheng as Ladybug, Marinette Dupain-Cheng Knows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:41:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25011055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caynaise/pseuds/caynaise
Summary: Ladybug’s visits never stop being like beginnings.
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug
Comments: 2
Kudos: 66





	good as new

**Author's Note:**

> For Day 6 of Ladrien June: Surprise visit
> 
> This was originally gonna be for the post-reveal prompt but I decided I wanted post-partial reveal and also didn’t feel like arting for day 6 so ... this doesn’t fit the prompt super nicely but take it

She comes by again, and Adrien wonders why. Given she’s been coming every night she can the soft thump by his window shouldn’t jolt him, but it does all the same. Every time she leaves, he thinks _this time_ it’s for good, no matter how disrespectful that might be to the vastness of his lady’s heart. She, of course—even without him uttering so much as a word—is determined to prove him wrong. Determined as she always was staring down akumas and turning up her nose at his poorly timed jokes while the side of her mask twitched with suppressed humour. 

There’s none of that now. Only concern, soft, wide-eyed, careful, and feather-light footsteps across the gaping chasm of his floor. It takes an eternity for her to reach the bed and for all his belief that she’d break this strange routine _eventually,_ he finds he’s desperate. 

Chat Noir knew Ladybug cared, but he isn’t used to so _much_ care, no longer limited—on his end, at least—by secrets and masks. 

For Adrien this is unheard of. 

He doesn’t realise how cold he was until his lady being here—really here—shocks the beginnings of warmth back into him. He figures he must be cold the rest of the time, long hours of staring at nothing while the TV drones in the background, all too aware of the emptiness of the mansion and the ghosts still creeping under his feet. He’s too tired to feel much of anything about it, but for now …

He has her. 

And she has him, tight and safe. She’s had him since the day she pulled him against her, upside down in a web of yoyo string and he still can’t wrap his head around that truth. 

“You’re freezing,” she says, after an accidental brush of hands as she sits beside him.

“You’re just hot. I mean. Warm. You know.” Does he have the capacity to be embarrassed? He must, because his hand is reaching for the back of his neck automatically, but his voice sounds hollow. 

There’s a new sort of awkwardness between them now—not the fluttery, giggly sort, but the sort that has Ladybug sitting stiffly as if they’re strangers on a crowded train while Adrien counts the palm widths between their thighs, thinking of how their hands might fit in the space. 

And, well, now that she’s found out who he is, maybe she _doesn’t_ know him. Ladybug doesn’t know Adrien Agreste, not really … and yet … it isn’t like that either.

“Yes. Um. That’s what I’m saying. As in, not—as in I am, uh, warm. And you’re clearly not.” 

He smiles faintly at that. “You could come a little closer, my—Ladybug.” More than anything else, it’s worry that his—that _Chat’s_ terms of endearment might make her drift further away that stops him. 

“Usually you’d just come closer to _me_ ,” she muses, and then her face contorts and she hurriedly sweeps her hair over her eyes. 

Yet after Hawkmoth’s defeat _she_ came to _him,_ as she always did despite claimed annoyance or rules or uncertainty. His transformation flashing away, her arms around him, hearing her say _Adrien Adrien Adrien_ in sharp, angry, heartbroken, loving sobs. There was too much in them to amount to just pity for the stupidly trusting boy under the mask. Or maybe he was dreaming up things that weren’t there. It would hardly be the first time.

She makes the move again now, sliding a cautious arm across his shoulders, and he’s helpless. Her fingers rub the feeling back into his, absently. 

Spiralling down from the heat of battle and revelations and shock, he’d begged to know who she was too. 

“No,” Ladybug said, gently, voice edged with panic. Ladybug’s ‘no’s don’t sound like the others, stifling and frigid. “Not now, I can’t … So much has happened and I have to be Ladybug a while longer—for my kitty, and … for Adrien too.”

Him too? Adrien, not Chat? Because she was a protector of Paris and he was … what? 

“But I promise you’ll know soon. This—right now—I—”

How soon she didn’t say. Still hasn’t said. She’s tried, or considered, stopping before she starts but her nervous glances linger a bit longer each time. And she’s still here. Waiting for him and for her and for the right moment—whatever that means, because if two people want something but broaching the subject again in the quiet of the aftermath is like de-shelling a crab with their bare hands, _is_ there a right moment?

Still, if every time he sees her outlined in moonlight it’s like the first time all over again, a heady, breathless rush, like fire in his veins tempering steel, that’s more than enough for now.

* * *

_For Adrien too._

She’s relentless as the days turn into weeks. Her mannerisms slowly become familiar to him … but they were already familiar, and not just _Ladybug’s_ mannerisms to Chat Noir. 

No. There’s the way she wiggles her entire body in boneless, liquid excitement. The pencil in her hand trailing lovely sinuous lines across a page. Her mastery of _Ultimate Mecha Strike III._

So when she shows up at his window with a basket of pastries, he looks at her and then at _it_ and back at her, and his heart quakes in wondrous confirmation and he sweeps her into his arms like Chat Noir did after Weredad. She squeaks and he catches the basket before it can fall. 

“A-Adrien?”

“I’m so glad to see you. _So_ glad.”


End file.
